The present invention relates to a liquid ejecting apparatus or a recording apparatus provided with a medium feeder operable to support and feed a target medium to be subjected to a liquid ejecting operation or a recording operation.
The liquid ejecting apparatus is not limited to a printer, a copier, or a facsimile which employs an ink jet recording head and ejects ink from the recording head to a recording medium, to thus effect recording. The liquid ejecting apparatus is employed to encompasses an apparatus that ejects a liquid appropriate to an application, in place of ink, from a liquid ejecting head corresponding to the ink jet recording head onto a target medium corresponding to a recording medium, thereby causing the liquid to adhere to the medium.
In addition to the recording head, the liquid ejecting head encompasses a coloring material ejecting head used for manufacturing a color filer such as a liquid-crystal display or the like; an electrode material (conductive paste) ejecting head used for forming electrodes, such as an organic EL display or a field emission display (FED) or the like; a bio-organic substance ejecting head used for manufacturing a bio-chip; a sample ejecting head serving as a precision pipette; and the like.
The recording apparatus is not limited to a printer, a copier, or a facsimile which employs an ink jet recording head and ejects ink from the recording head to a recording medium, to thus effect recording. The recording apparatus is employed to encompasses an apparatus that performs recording on a recording medium in a dot-impact manner or a thermal transfer manner.
An ink jet printer is an example of the recording apparatus or the liquid ejecting apparatus. In many cases, an ink jet printer is provided with a feeder (a so-called automatic sheet feeder) which can set a plurality of printing sheets serving as a recording medium or a target medium. Such a feeder has an edge guide for guiding an edge of a sheet as disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication No. 2002-255360A. The edge guide is provided so as to be slidable in the widthwise direction of the sheet, as well as to be retained at an appropriate position corresponding to the size of the sheet. By such an edge guide, edges of sheets are aligned, and during feeding each of the sheets is fed in a correct attitude without being skewed.
In recent years, ink jet printers of a type integrated with a scanner have been on the market. The scanner-integrated ink jet printer has a scanner unit disposed above a printing section which performs printing on a sheet; and is advantageous in that an image can be read by the scanner unit, and the thus-read image can be directly recorded by a printing section without by way of processing by an external personal computer, or the like.
However, in such an ink jet printer of a scanner-integrated type, the scanner unit is mounted above the printing section. Consequently, this type of ink jet printer has been disadvantageous in that the edge guide is hidden under the scanner unit mounted above, thereby degrading the edge guide in terms of ease of visual recognition. When the edge guide is degraded in ease of visual recognition, there may arise a problem such that a user, who has failed to recognize the presence of the edge guide, feeds a sheet without positioning the edge guide at an appropriate position, thereby causing a skew of the sheet, and eventually failure in obtainment of a favorable recording result In addition, when the edge guide is hidden under the scanner unit mounted above, operability of the edge guide is also degraded.